Seven prescriptions for guaranteed misery: Ingest chemicals to alter mood, harbor envy and resentment, be unreliable, learn only from your own experience, stay down after setbacks, and ignore the power of inversion.
Book: Poor Charlie's Almanack
Johnny Carson once gave a commencement speech where he said he couldn't tell graduates how to be happy, but he could tell them from personal experience how to guarantee misery.
Carson's three prescriptions for sure misery:
- Ingesting chemicals in an effort to alter mood or perception
- Envy
- Resentment
Charlie Munger added four more prescriptions:
- Be unreliable. Do not faithfully do what you have engaged to do. Master this habit, and you will be distrusted and excluded from the best human contributions and companies.
- Learn everything from your own experience. Minimize what you learn vicariously from the good and bad experiences of others, living and dead. This prescription is a guarantee for misery and mediocrity.
- Go down and stay down when you get your first, second, or third severe reverse in the battle of life. Because there is so much adversity out there, even for the lucky and wise, this will guarantee that you will be permanently trapped in misery.
- Ignore the saying, "I wish I knew where I was going to die, and then I'd never go there." If you want fuzzy thinking and infelicity, discount this method of thinking backward from what you want to avoid.
Munger's prescriptions work because they compound. Unreliability destroys trust over time. Learning only from personal experience limits your sample size to one lifetime. Staying down after setbacks prevents the recovery that naturally follows persistence.
And inversion, thinking about what to avoid, is perhaps Munger's most powerful mental model. Instead of asking "How do I succeed?", ask "What would guarantee failure?" Then avoid those things.
You can read the whole talk here: Talk One.